He was in the middle of the scale already; faster whirled that distant wheel, and the intense tone struck C in alt. I felt a yearning for some harmony; that terrible, simple, single tone was so elemental, so savage; it racked my nerves and strained them to unison, like the rosined bow drawn close against the violin-string itself. It grew intensely shrill; fearfully, piercingly shrill; shrill to the rending-point of the tympanum; and then came silence. I looked. In the dusk of the adjoining warehouse the huge wheel was whirling more rapidly than ever. The German professor gazed into my eyes, his own were bright with triumph, on his lips a curl of cynicism. “Now,” he said, “you will have what you call emotions. But, first, I must bind you close.” I shrugged my shoulders amiably, smiling with what at the time I thought contempt, while he deftly took a soft white rope and bound me many times to his chair. But the rope was very strong, and I now saw that the frame-work of the chair was of iron. And even while he bound me, I started as if from a sleep, and became conscious of the dull whirring caused by the powerful machinery that abode within the house, and suddenly a great rage came over me. I, fool, and this man! I swelled and strained at the soft white ropes that bound me, but in vain.... By God, I could have killed him then and there!... And he looked at me and grinned, twisting his face to fit his crooked soul. I strained at the ropes, and I think one of them slipped a bit, for his face blanched; and then I saw him go into the other room and press the last lever back a little, and it seemed to me the wheel revolved more slowly. Then, in a moment, all was peace again, and it was as if I heard a low, sweet sound, only that there was no sound, but something like what you might dream the music of the spheres to be. He came to my chair again and unbound me. My momentary passion had vanished. “Light your cigar,” he said, “it has gone out.” I did so. I had a strange, restful feeling, as of being at one with the world, a sense of peace, between the peace of death and that of sleep. “This,” he said, “is the pulse of the world; and it is Sleep. You remember, in the Nibelung-saga, when Erda, the Earth spirit, is invoked, unwillingly she appears, and then she says, _Lass mich schlafen_--let me sleep on--to Wotan, king of the gods? Some of the old myths are true enough, though not the Christian ones, most always.... This pulse of the earth seems to you dead silence, yet the beats are pulsing thousands a second faster than the highest sound.... For emotions are subtler things than sound, as you sentimental ones would say; you poets that talk of ‘heart’ and ‘soul.’ We men of science say it this way: That those bodily organs that answer to your myth of a soul are but more widely framed, more nicely textured, so as to respond to the impact of a greater number of movements in the second.”